Unlock Your Inner Rain Man by Electrically Zapping Your Brain

Electrically stimulating the brain could make you smarter. Image: Allan Snyder

Imagine a creativity cap. A device that would free you, if only momentarily, from your mindsets, from your prejudices, from the mental blocks to creativity.

These words are emblazoned on the website Creativitycap.com, and they represent the vision of neuroscientist Allan Snyder. Snyder believes we all possess untapped powers of cognition, normally seen only in rare individuals called savants, and accessing them might take just a few jolts of electricity to the brain.

It sounds like a Michael Crichton plot, but Snyder, of the University of Sydney, Australia, says he wouldn’t be surprised to see a prototype of the creativity cap within a couple of years. His research suggests that brain stimulation improves people’s ability to solve difficult problems. But Snyder’s interpretation of his findings remains controversial, and the science of using brain stimulation to boost thinking is still in its early stages.

“I think it’s a bit of a minefield,” said psychologist Robyn Young of Flinders University in Australia, who has tried to replicate Snyder’s early experiments. “I’m not really sure whether the technology is developed that can turn it into a more accurate science.”

Snyder has long been fascinated by savants — people with a developmental brain disorder (often autism) or brain injury who display prowess in a particular area, such as mathematics, art or music, which far exceeds the norm. Kim Peek, who provided the inspiration for Dustin Hoffman’s character in the movie “Rain Man,” was a savant who could memorize entire books after a single reading, or instantly calculate what day of the week any calendar date fell on. But he had a severe mental disability that prevented him from performing simple actions such as buttoning his shirt.

Wisconsin psychiatrist and savant expert Darold Treffert describes a skill like Kim’s as an “island of genius that stands in stark contrast to the overall handicap.”

Other savants acquire their abilities after a severe brain injury or illness. Alonzo Clemons suffered a head injury as a toddler that left him mentally disabled, but endowed him with the ability to accurately sculpt beautiful clay animals after only briefly glimpsing them. And patients with frontotemporal dementia have been known to suddenly display artistic and musical abilities, like the successful businessman who developed dementia and started doing award-winning painting.

But not all savant abilities come with a trade-off, says Treffert. Sometimes it’s possible for otherwise normal people to have savant skills.

Snyder hypothesizes that all people possess savant-like abilities in a dormant form, but that savants have “privileged access” to less-processed, lower-level information. In a normal brain, top-down controls suppress the barrage of raw data our brains take in, enabling us to focus on the big picture.

“We all have that information,” Snyder said, “but our brains are deliberately wired not to see it.”

Using brain stimulation, he thinks it’s possible to temporarily remove that mental suppression and unlock the savant inside each of us. In their latest study, published in April in Neuroscience Letters, Snyder and graduate student Richard Chi tested people’s performance on a geometric puzzle called the nine dots problem (right).

The goal is to connect all nine dots using just four straight lines, without lifting your pen up or retracing a line. It’s a classic problem that researchers have been giving people for a century, but in the majority of experiments, no participants are able to solve it, even with plenty of time and many attempts. (If you have tried and failed, here’s the solution.)

Snyder and Chi had their subjects attempt to solve the problem while wearing an electrode cap. After a few minutes without brain stimulation, half of the subjects received stimulation while the other half received no stimulation. Here’s the interesting part: Whereas none of the subjects solved the problem before brain stimulation, more than 40 percent of subjects in the stimulation group solved the problem after being zapped. Talk about being struck by inspiration.

In case you’re imagining some kind of Frankensteinian setup for electrifying people’s brains, it’s nothing like that. The technique, called transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), involves applying a weak electrical current to the scalp through a pair of electrodes on sponges. It’s a widely used technique that is considered safe, with minor side effects. Other researchers have shown cognitive improvements using the same method applied to other brain areas, but Snyder and Chi are the first to use stimulation to mimic savant brain physiology.

Autism, left frontotemporal dementia, and savantism resulting from brain injury have all been associated with deficits in the left hemisphere of the brain. Though the left brain/right brain skill dichotomy is an oversimplification, they do specialize in function, says Treffert. The left brain, which is dominant in most people, is more heavily involved in language and reason, while the right brain plays a bigger role in visuospatial and artistic ability. Scientists theorize that in savants, limitations in left-brain function allow the right brain to compensate. In Snyder and Chi’s study, they applied stimulation to suppress brain activity in the left anterior temporal lobe while simultaneously exciting activity in the right anterior temporal lobe.

Often, our approach to a problem is shaped by our earlier experiences, making it harder to come up with new solutions. In a previous study, Snyder and Chi tested whether their brain stimulation method could make people more insightful while they performed “matchstick arithmetic,” in which they were given false equations written in Roman numerals with matches and had to make the equation true by moving one match. Solving each matchstick problem required a different strategy, and those who had the stimulation solved them faster, they found.

Snyder’s earlier studies used magnetic, rather than electrical, stimulation to try to elicit savant abilities. One study showed a change in artistic ability, while another found improved numerosity, the ability to precisely estimate a large number of objects without counting them.

But as of yet, not many of Snyder’s studies have been replicated. Australian psychologist Robyn Young did a study in 2004 that examined the effect of magnetic stimulation on savant-type skills such as drawing, memory, mathematics and calendar calculating. In five out of 17 subjects, some improvement was observed, but most of the findings weren’t statistically significant. A follow-up study failed to show any effect of the stimulation.

Young thinks the idea of improving cognition with brain stimulation is plausible, but “there were so many variables involved,” she said, such as where to stimulate and how long the effect lasts, that she dropped the work to pursue other research.

Supposing a creativity cap ever does become available, it raises many questions. Can we truly achieve the mental equivalent of a free lunch, without drawbacks in other areas of thinking? Perhaps the genius effect will subside after repeated use. As with any form of cognitive enhancement, there’s the question of ethics. Finally, as Young put it, “If everyone could play music brilliantly or be brilliant artists, it would minimize diversity.”